Focuses on the language situation in Luxembourg, examining the interference between Letzeburgesch on one hand and, French German, and English on the other. Bourdieu's concept of legitimate language is modified to match the situation in Luxembourg of "triglossia with trilinguaism" and the legitimate multilingual language competence, which…

Focuses on language contact phenomena at the borders of Switzerland's four language communities (German, French, Italian, and Romansch), the legal status of the four Swiss national languages, and the language policies of individual bilingual and trilingual cantons. Describes the historical movements of the language boundaries, with particular…

A study investigated the extent of anglicization of Solomon Islands Pijin, the primary language for Honiara, the nation's capital. It was found that the influence of English was not related to the creolization of Pijin but rather to the bilingualism of the speakers of Pijin and to their high degree of fluency and contact with English. (Author/CB)

Assumes unified language behavior including verbal, kinesic, and prosodic forms. Proposes that interlanguage theory should be expanded to include kinesic and prosodic modes of behavior. Suggests that acquisition of second-language kinesic and prosodic forms takes place similarly to acquisition of verbal forms and that acquisition is developmental,…

The role of interference effects in sentence processing has recently begun to receive attention, however whether these effects arise during encoding or retrieval remains unclear. This paper draws on basic memory research to help distinguish these explanations and reports data from an experiment that manipulates the possibility for retrieval…

The authors investigated effects of task and overlapping processing load on semantic processing. In 3 experiments the brain potential component N400 was elicited by synonymous and nonsynonymous spoken noun pairs that were to be classified according to semantic relatedness. The time course of the N=400 component to the nouns was delayed, and its…

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form,…

The purpose of this study was to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened native signers for the temporary retention of written words with reference to a primary language-coding hypothesis (M. A. Shand, 1982). For the gathering of the data, participants were shown lists of serially presented written…

American Italian exhibits interference from English in loanwords, loanblends, loanshift extensions and loan translations, and some of these are analyzed in this paper. (CK)

A study examined repair sequences in talk between two German-English bilingual children and between parent and child within a nuclear family in which German is generally spoken. Data were drawn from tape recordings and developmental diaries kept on the two preschool children. Patterns of parent-child and child-child corrections were examined. In…

Observation of language change caused by language contact tend not to support theories put forth by Meillet, Jakobson, Weinreich, and others that there are linguistic prerequisites for such change. A theory of the social factors that determine what kinds of language change will take place as a result of contact begins with the recognition of two…

THE SIMPLE PRESENT PERFECT AND PRESENT PERFECT CONTINUOUS ARE FOR THE NON-NATIVE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH TWO OF THE MOST TROUBLESOME TENSES IN THE ENGLISH VERB SYSTEM. THEY ARE SOMETIMES CONFUSED WITH A PRESENT TENSE AND SOMETIMES WITH A PAST. ONE OFTEN HEARS A NON-NATIVE SPEAKER OF ENGLISH USE A SIMPLE PRESENT WHERE HE SHOULD USE A SIMPLE PRESENT…

It has long been realized that tense is not a feature of the Chinese verb system, which is controlled by a set of particles attached to the verb or to the sentence as a whole. The various usages involving these particles have been listed and described, the author points out, but the system as a whole has not been clearly defined. He suggests the…

Various manners of presenting two vocabularies were compared in terms of rate of learning and amount of immediate and delayed retention. Four concurrent and two consecutive conditions were used, each comprising two sets of symbols (nonsense syllables distinguished by a color cue) associated with a common set of referents (nonsense forms). Twenty…